Micron Co-developing Non-Volatile DRAM

[Guest]

AgigA Tech has found a partner to work to bring its non-volatile DRAMs to market: Micron said that it is co-developing the technology with Cypress Semiconductor's subsidiary.

Micron Co-developing Non-Volatile DRAM : Read more

 

[assasin32]

Well that would make cold boot attacks much easier.

 

[manofchalk]

Interesting, wonder what other applications that this could bring. Imagine something along the lines of super fast USB drives or tablet storage could be possible, with the RAM acting as a cache to the flash memory.

 

[fuzzion]

My 1987 sony amp already did that. Infact, the capacitors were so awesomely old that you could switch it off and still hear your music for a few seconds later.

 

[merikafyeah]

Sweet! With this you won't have to save all your work when you need to swap out your laptop batteries.
Just enter standby, insert new battery, resume where you left off. How I wish I could do this now.

 

[immanuel_aj]

I guess hibernating a computer would make it come out of that state even faster now if this is possible. And a RAM drive would really be an actual drive, the contents remaining in between powering the computer off.

 

[tiret]

looking forward to the day when i can start my pc and immediately get the windows login screen.
that is one of the main reasons people leave their machines on when they leave work - ultimately millions of pc's stay on for nothing every day - think of the wasted energy - the unnecessary green house emissions.

 

[myromance123]

Is it possible with tech like this that volatile DRAM would become obsolete?

 

[hardcore_gamer]

[citation][nom]myromance123[/nom]Is it possible with tech like this that volatile DRAM would become obsolete?[/citation]
Not really. Battery powered devices such as tablets and smartphones don't require NVRAM

 

[tomfreak]

they could have just add the entire thing into SSD as a cache much like SSD flash on a HDD = Hybrid drive is always a good thing. SSD with DRAM as cache would prove useful for frequent use data, so this will further improve SSD write cycle as we shrink the SSD process nm.

 

[rantoc]

This have loads of applications and if the speed / density is high enough it could replace both dram and flash with one type. Why have an ssd when the program is already "installed" into the main memory and will remain even after shut-down... The security concerns is another matter, mem resident programs and the like will have a whole new meaning....

 

[DRosencraft]

I would imagine that a better route would be to improve the time it takes to write from the memory to the actual storage device. Yes, this NVRAM idea does sound interesting... but isn't it a little too late? I might be thinking things through poorly, but isn't part of the faster shutdown times with SSDs specifically because data is transferred faster from the memory to the storage? I guess NVRAM would help with sudden power loss or something, but for conventional use, improving the read/write speeds of SSDs would seem to be the better path in the long term.

 

[Guest]

In practice, this sounds very similar to a ramdisk, whereby the option to save the image is turned on and done so before the computer turns off.

 

[oldboy2508]

What happen to Mresistor memory research? Has it stopped?

 

[zakaron]

I've done this a couple times before - while working on some hardware changes I forgot my system was in sleep mode, so I'd pull the power cord and make the change I needed to do. When powering back on however, Windows would be confused why it can't find the contents of RAM when trying to wake up from sleep mode. Those were certainly facepalm moments. And yes, that's plural.

I could also see this as a benefit for RAID controllers that use a rechargable battery backup DRAM solution to preserve contents of it's cache until power is restored to finish writes out to disk. This solution seems more reliable as I've seen numerous batteries go bad on these setups.

I think this would finally make a viable RAMdisk solution should power be lost before the software can write the contents to an image.

Very cool tech!

 

[internetlad]

a 370 watch battery glued to the side lol